The Highest Compliment

There comes a time in the life of every open source community when they know they’ve made it…that the work they are doing is fundamentally changing the industry and impacting how people look at the development landscape.

So when is that moment? Is it when it hits 50 million downloads? Is it when the projects are given award after award? Is it when hundreds of companies are building products on top of your platform?

Nope.

You really know you’ve made it when Microsoft starts telling the world that it is way more expensive to use your open source tools than it is to buy their products.

Thanks Microsoft! That is just such a nice compliment to the Eclipse projects and its developers.

BTW — If anyone actually has a copy of the MS materials, we’d love to see them. You can reach me at mike at eclipse.org.